Barnag

Barnag
Bence Szilágyi
Barnag, Balaton, Hungary

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Bence Szilágyi makes wine in Barnag, a village in western Hungary close to Lake Balaton. Bence studied wine in Budapest and Pfalz, but he first discovered natural wine on a trip to Berlin at Neukölln’s well-loved bar and bistro, Jaja. Inspired by this approach to winemaking and the diversity of flavour it offered, he left his more conventional wine studies behind and began to visit low intervention wineries, tasting and exchanging ideas on vinification and farming.

Bence made his first, unofficial vintage in 2017, in a cellar dug into limestone bedrock beneath his family home in Barnag. What started as an experiment of just 400 bottles slowly grew, and Bence has since relocated to a 200-year-old stone barn, now converted into a winery.

Still a relatively small producer, Bence works with around 5 hectares of grapes, half from vineyards he rents and farms himself while the other half are purchased from a local negociant farmer; an ongoing relationship which gives Bence a fuller understanding of the grapes and vineyards. Buying land in this area is almost impossible, with real estate prices driven up by Lake Balaton’s popularity as a tourist destination. 

Varieties include Riesling, Furmint, Kékfrankos (known as Blaufränkisch in Austria and Lemberger in Germany), Cabernet Franc and Cabernet Sauvignon, and the vineyards are predominantly limestone, with one plot on volcanic soil. Bence takes a no-till approach unusual for the area, relying on naturally occurring flora as cover crop.

Charming and multi-talented, Bence isn’t one to sit still: alongside winemaking he runs a wine import company, Disco Wines, and a modern European bistro in Budapest, Cabrio.